The following is a list of things that were available before the crash that
are not presently available, for one reason or another. All of these things
will become available again in the future, but no timeframe is available
right now:

In addition to these things, the RC Car is broken for reasons unrelated to
the server crash. Check the previous news entry for information on that.
At some point, I plan to pick up work on the object of the day again. I've
been working on the map, and plan to populate the map with as much furniture
as possible before the IRTC deadline at the
end of April. After that, I'll probably consider it finished.

It's amazing. When the car works, hardly anyone ever plays with it. But
the second it's broken, the bitching and whining and moaning begins. To save
myself the excessive repetition, I will post a semi-detailed explaination
of the problem here, once and for all.

Ever since I got the camera fixed, the car has broken 4 times. The camera
part works fine. The problem resides in four transistors that feed power
to the motors in the vehicle. These transistors get HOT. So hot, in fact,
that they each have heatsinks with over two square inches of surface area
to dissipate the heat. After a couple weeks of 24 hour operation, the
car has probably taken more abuse than it was designed for. No, ladies
and gentlemen, Radio Shack RC Cars are NOT designed to be controlled via
the internet. They're not designed to be crashed into walls 500 times a day.
They're not designed to run 24 hours a day. They're not designed to carry
10 extra pounds of weight.

After an exhaustive search, I was able to locate an inexpensive local source
for the transistors, and I have stocked up on them in anticipation of future
problems. However, all my efforts at repair have taken a toll on the circuit
board in the car. All the copper contacts on the board have started peeling
off due to all the excessive soldering. It's therefore getting harder
and harder to replace the components without destroying the board.

My plan now is to not solder the transistors to the board at all. Instead
I'm going to solder some transistor sockets onto the board, then just plug
the transistors into those. That way, if and most certainly WHEN they burn
out, it will be a two minute process to replace them and won't cause any
further damage to the board and my only concern will be the cost of the
transistors, but at 50 cents apiece every two weeks, I'll deal with it.

So as soon as I get those components replaced, the car will be operational
again and you may immediately proceed with your efforts to break it again.
The car itself isn't the best mobile platform, for this reason among others,
and it will probably only be a temporary installment until I have a chance
to build one of the quakebots. After those are functional, the car will
probably get retired. But we'll see.

I've made a few cosmetic changes. Instead of icons, the cams are now live
views from the cams, and if you hover the mouse over one of them, they will
update. I'll probably add an option to update all of them at once, but that
can wait. I also added a map option. If you select the map, then hover
the mouse over the map, it will show you the cam image from the room the
mouse hovers over. The map is still somewhat crude, and I'm still working on
adding more furniture, doors, windows, etc, but you get the basic idea of
what my house looks like. I'll add some labels to the map sometime to show
which room is what, or at least add another legend map to show that, since
on 320x240, there's not a whole lot of room for excess labels.

The HD is even worse now than it was before. At this point, I've officially
given up. I'm going to copy what little remains off the other partition and
just nuke it completely. I might try a reformat and see if it functions
ok afterwards, but I don't plan to actually trust it again for anything
important.

Yes, I know the car is broken again. I managed to find an exact replacement
for the transistors, but the circuit board itself has taken some abuse with
all my soldering & resoldering, so I don't want to have to replace it more than
one more time. As soon as I can get some transistor sockets I'll solder those
onto the board instead of the transistors themselves, so whenever one of the
transistors blow again, I can just swap them out in a couple minutes without
the downtime.

Another nifty (at least I seem to think so) feature. Check the manifest page.
Some of the pictures on there now have a slideshow... a motion picture if you
will. Just hover the mouse over a picture and they'll play a sequence of
recorded images until you move the mouse off the picture. Soon, I should have
all the manifest page images enabled with this feature and some of the visitors
page images.

Finally got the HD cleaned off enough that I'm running fsck on the nuked
partition. I started it yesterday. It's still running. And it's been
recovering about 4 files a second. There might actually be some hope.

Ok, first things first, the car works again. I somehow managed to fix it.
I don't know how long it will last before it breaks again, but at least now
I know HOW to fix it when it does. For kicks, I might get the other car fixed
while this one is still working, so if and when it breaks, I'll only have to
swap them out. YaY!

I've recoded almost everything for the site now. The comments and cookies
are now located on a third server. I have a second mirror webserver set up
that gets updated periodically. As soon as I'm sure it's 100% functional, I'll
loadbalance the website, so both webservers share the hit load. This will have
the added bonus of not relying on any one machine as a single point of failure.

Someone must have thought that I needed some more challenges. Yesterday I
received two additional ones. First off, the other partition on the
"Most annoying Hard Disk in the World!!!"(tm) has been rapidly developing
little errors that likely foretell the imminent death of the whole drive, but
in the meantime just A: give me tons of read errors when I try to copy
everything off of it, and B: crash the server at random intervals.

And just in case that wasn't enough, the RC Car broke. Something tells me
that these cars were never designed to be controlled over the internet while
carrying 10 extra pounds of payload. Excessive crashing into walls/other
objects was probably not recommended in the manual either. So now the
hunt begins for another car of the same model. And since this seems to be
a recurring event, I'm going to need to stockpile one of two things. Either
I'm going to need a backup collection of these cars, The Radio Shack Sampson
model, or I'm going to need to get ahold of some spare PE200 & PE201
transistors, since these are what actually blows up, causing the car to
break. Also, the specs on those transistors would also be nice, since
they're blowing up due to overheating, and they've already got a pretty
hefty heatsink attached to them as it is. Larger transistors might last
longer, but I only know the pinout, and my efforts to replace them with
other transistors has so far been ineffective.

This got me thinking, fleeting thoughts for those that once wanted to donate
something, shipping me that specific car model if you find it would be
great. However, fleeting that idea, it led to another. Would there be any
interest in shipping me an RC Car, having me mod it to be controlled via
computer, and shipping it back? Probably something around cost of shipping
back + $10-15 in parts + $25 labor. Oh well, something to think about.

Right now, my efforts are concentrated on getting the rest of the data copied
off the dud harddrive. I'm not really in the position to afford a new one
right now, although this one is only 3 months old, so I'll investigate some
warranty work.

The recovery process is going slowly but surely. Attempting to scan the
partition for source hasn't been successful. At some point I decided it would
just be faster to redo the code from scratch instead of wasting all my time
searching for it. Besides, I get a chance to do most of it right this time,
instead of the fubared wasteland it was before. :)

This is also a turning point of sorts. If I can keep up the momentum I've
shown this week, I might actually be able to accomplish something. There
are many things I've wanted to do with the site that I simply haven't
felt motivated to get done. Perhaps I've spent too much time glorified in my
achievements to put forth the effort to continue the quest, whatever that
may be. But in the last week, I've managed to redo, almost from scratch,
what I've spent the last 4 years working on. Would I to concentrate my efforts
that much all the time, imagine what could be accomplished. And I think I
will. All those "it would be cool if..." things, will get done. I'm going
to shave down that projects list. Its there for a reason. Not to show off
the ideas that stagnate in my mind, but the things to work on each and every
day.

What started as a simple hardware upgrade turned into a mess. I wanted to
install a 100mbps card instead of the 10mbps I had in there. The good news
is, the 100mbps card is now installed. The bad news is.... *sigh*

Booting back up, it loaded the wrong kernel. no problem, I'll just have to
reboot again, so I wait until it finishes booting. Well, it got stuck in
an infinite loop running a couple scripts. I'm not sure why exactly, but
it was probably something I did wrong. I can't log in to stop the
runaway process, nor can I do the three finger salute to do a clean
shutdown, so I hit the power switch. Coming back up the second time,
this time choosing the right kernel from lilo. Turns out that one was
wrong too, so I figure it'll get stuck in the same trap. I wait for it to
finish booting anyway, just in case I have better luck this time. It gets
to init, and gets stuck there. Peculiar.

I boot off a floppy to get in there to see if the inittab file or something
is acting screwy. Comment out most of the stuff in rc.local just for good
measure and try to reboot again. No dice. Still getting stuck at inittab.
Well, its possible to mess up my root directory. It happens. And it
wouldn't be the first time I've reloaded the OS, so I figure its easist
to just back up the few system config files and reload it, a 2 hour process
at most. It had been a few years anyway, so why not. So I mount up my
partitions to find a convienent place to copy stuff too. And it would turn
out the most likely candidate is my 88 gig paritition, /dev/hdc4 which has
PLENTY of free space. And that's where I ran into trouble.

mount gives me TONS of errors. That's the first sinking feeling. Then it
finally gets mounted and I do a directory listing of the root directory. Well,
it sorta looked like a directory listing. Maybe it would have looked better
while standing on my head. Root directory was nuked. Inode 2 has been
fubared. My life just got a lot more difficult.

I fire up debugfs to see if I can make some sense out of the mess. Even if the root directory is messed up, I can still go in there and rebuild it if I can
find the inodes for the directories linked under it, and this isn't TOO hard
to do, because all you have to do is find ANY directory on the drive and follow
the toplevel inode link up.

How I wish it was that easy. Unfortunately, it would appear that fsck, while
booting up, decided that since there wasn't anything linked from the top
directory, that all the inodes were really free space, and proceeded to clear
all the inodes. And I mean ALL of them. Now I'm feeling sick.

The problem here, is the two most important directories on the system were on
that drive. All the webspace and my home directory, which contains, among
other things, all the source code for all my projects. The semi good news
is that I had a recent backup of the website, and SOME of the code was copied
in there, and other source is availble elsewhere. In fact, most of the source
I'm currently lacking is a bunch of small cgi applications that I can reproduce
if I need to. 400 lines of code max.

However, I may not have to. Although the inode table on the drive is
effectively worthless, the data itself is all still there. I can't directly
access it anymore, but I CAN access the partition device and read the
entire drive byte by byte, including all the source. So I have dd scanning
the drive and grepping for #include lines, which typically will mark the top
of my source files. Since most of my source files are less than 4k in size,
they'll fit within the datablock and I won't have to search for a bunch of
pieces. Of course, all the media I had stored on that drive is gone, but
that's only a minor annoyance. Seeing how I can't even remember what any of
it is, I'm not planning on losing any sleep over it.

Now, here's the lesson for everyone, including myself. BACKUP! no.. really.
BACK YOUR SHIT UP! This is a really shitty way of losing a lot of work, and
a totally unnecessary one. I got lucky. It could have been worse. But I'm
going to make every possible effort to be sure it never is again.

When you play the peon, people's expectations of you are lower. You are
not considered to have an air of authority. People will generally take what
you say with a grain of salt until you've proven yourself to be of reputable
character. However, once you've been granted a position of authority, people
will generally take your word for things, even if they have no reason to
otherwise. They expect you'll be honest and straightforward with your answers.
While sarcasm has its place at times, there are times when it is not
appropriate. And those in authority have a duty to understand the difference.

That being said, when someone joins the irc channel and asks if the site is
real, when someone being sarcastic says that it's fake, they accept it and
leave. They have no reason not to believe you. And while I'm of the
impression that anyone who thinks the site is fake probably still lives in
the stoneage, I'm also willing to entertain someone's scepticism when all
they require is a simple confirmation from some other living human being that
things are what they appear to be.

When someone comes along acting rude and disrespectful, certainly, encourage
them to leave. I don't have a problem with that. But when someone comes
along asking honest, if simple and obvious questions, either answer politely
or politely point them to a page that will answer their question more adaquately
than a simple oneliner can. Or say nothing at all. But don't answer with
sharp rude comment that puts the newcomer on the defensive. It's simple
human nature at that point to react appropriately. How would it feel, you
come along, impressed by the site with additional interest in it, and your
first encounter with someone who seems to know what's going on responds by
telling you to basically get lost.

So yesterday, when someone new joins the channel, asking everyone if they've
heard of the site, all it would have taken would be ONE person to say that
"yes, we all know about it". But no. Instead there are tons of "We never
heard about it" "It must be fake!"... This from people I've trusted and
respected. And after making this new person feel very low for asking,
putting her on the defensive, she responds to the abuse and gets kick/banned as
a reward. And not one person tried to stop it. Everyone's just laughing along
like the random abuse of strangers who had nothing but nice things to say is
perfectly acceptable.

And then I come along. And I attempt to put things in perspective. And I
get the same load of sarcastic BS from the same people I respect when I'm trying
to be serious about something. Of course, its my fault. My fault I ever trusted any of them to begin with.

For those that look at the average googlesnack list and wonder why the sudden
obsession with 14 year old girls and thongs, a little explaination may be
in order. Anytime a website links to me, and someone clicks on that link, it
makes an entry in my logfile. Part of that entry is the full URL of the
webpage that has my link. I usually use this to see what people out there
are saying about my site. Its (usually) good for my ego. :) Now, on
google, a popular search engine if you didn't
know, when you enter a search term, it returns a bunch of links to pages.
Go there now and search for something, like silly things. You'll get
a page with a bunch of links to sites on it. If you look at the URL of this
page, you see that the words "silly things" appear in the URL of the page
you're currently on. If one of the links on this page was for my site,
that URL will show up in my logs, so I know what people were searching for
when they found my site.

Now, normally, when I get a hit from google, the search makes sense. They're
searching for the site itself "Drive me insane", or something about insanity,
or webcams, or rc cars, or the names of some of the people on my site. All
of those searches make perfect sense. However, every so often, someone is
searching for something strange and it still returns a link to my site.
That strange search is what I call a googlesnack. And I list some of them
here for your enjoyment.